In Winter's Eye

About the Book

My endeavor here is to validate and document “In Winter’s Eye” what causes me to reflect, and try to recapture, in retrospect, my experiences--events propelled then by my pervasive apprehension of frost.  This symbolic cold weather chills me to the bone In Winter’s Eye, which has now resurfaced in this brooding, but stark and detail reality.  Yet, though the metaphorical winter weather doesn’t bother me that much anymore, but when I accidentally get onto that slippery patch of racial black ice that camouflages the asphalt “Thrue-way” as passable, then, it would hit on my wheels and send me careening into a chaotic irrational verbal spin.  My meeting with that icy patch on life’s roadway to somewhere, or nowhere for that matter, freewheels my sense of direction as it throws me off my intended course of normal human progress; after which I would struggle to maintain control of myself and the vehicle of my life I am driving down the road, if not to somewhere in the future, but to obliterate the past, where my wheels would swerve and skid helter skelter, luckily, into the shoulder of the “Thrue-way” for my ultimate survival.

It became a necessity for me then, after meeting head-on the pronounced differences intoned by the assonant and dissonant sounds that racial preference plays out with acrimony, compared with the personal autonomy of my parent culture and the restrictions based on race in another’s.  My endeavor to be accepted by my peers saw me struggle to adapt and to assimilate the new culture I enter, of which I wrote about “In Winter’s Eye," or simply to remain, not just as an entity, but preferably that of a functional individual, as in the following.

It is in such an ethnic arena that one “jazz-dance” to the subtle tempo from the racial nuances afoot, as one tries to keep time to that unique racial beat, sufficient to make one assess ones’ common experiences with others, keeping in mind, meanwhile, how it was in the countries, I lived and traveled over the years.

In the fall of 1967, it was not a dream I had awakened from, and found myself living a life, akin to that of a spectator perched on a ledge in the balcony, gawking at the happenings taking place below in the arena.  My consciousness held sway as I ogled at the vibrant milieu of racial politics happening then in my  New York.  I was not dreaming either when I found myself living in an apartment in Corona, Queens, as it was my natural evolvement within the trajectory of my migratory, path to the Big Apple.  Neither was I having an-out-of-body experience that spirited me from Jamaica to London, then whisked me off to Toronto on a tidal wave, and finally being carried aloft by a big silver bird that landed me in the New York, slab-dab in the middle of the Civil Rights struggle.  It was a vast struggle then, and remains so today, though on a higher level as still a living, breathing, a phenomenon that, in the 1960's, had elicited a mad rush of water to ooze from fire hoses manned by assiduous, if not sadistic, law and order protagonists that swept their fellow American brethren off their feet, and tossed them several yards from the offending fray.

About the Author

Wallace Collins was born in Jamaica, West Indies, and immigrated to London, England as a youth, where he soon married Pauline, shortly after which they moved to Toronto, Canada. He began to write seriously in Toronto before he moved to New York where he has been living now for decades. Mr. Collins is a graduate of Queens College, and has worked most of his life as a Cabinetmaker in the countries he lived. He has since retired from work and is now writing fiction full time.